Gentleman Cyclist

13/03/2025

Travelling to Spain

Filed under: Europe,holiday — admin @ 10:30 PM

Having developed a growing aversion to cold, miserable, damp weather, Janet and I took the decision this year to avoid a fair chunk of the raw English winter by spending it in southern Spain, where we felt we could possibly shun the sheer unbridled misery of the dank, cold stuff that even the temperate south-east of England is liable to throw at us. So we booked a ferry crossing from Portsmouth to Santander for mid-January (we have given up flying about 20 years ago in order to salve our environmental consciences) and a return ticket almost 6 weeks later. Around that I designed a holiday, booking accommodation, rail tickets and a hire car. All of this was massively outside of our comfort zones, which had shrunk considerably since the start of the pandemic, but it all worked beautifully and we think we will do the same next year.

Our outward trip began on 16th January, when we caught a train from Prittlewell to Portsmouth. We didn’t really know what to expect, and travelled several hours earlier than we need have done, and spent an awful lot of time in the ferry terminal (I sometimes wonder if it’s called a “terminal” because so many people die of boredom there). However, we were finally invited to board at about 10.45pm, for an 11.30 departure, and off we went.

Portsmouth to Santander takes somewhere in the region of 30 hours, so we had to spend two nights on the ferry on the way out. It’s actually a very civilised way to travel. I have to say that I was somewhat concerned that being on a pretty luxurious boat for all of that time might actually involve a comparable carbon footprint to flying, but I did a bit of reading and found that our ferry, the Santona, the most recent of the Brittany Ferries fleet, runs off liquified natural gas (methane) and that some of it (I confess that I don’t know how much) is bio-methane manufactured in a digester in Galicia, so it’s considerably more environmentally friendly than a diesel-powered ferry would be.

Ferry travel is really rather good. You have an entire day just to laze around. I paid the necessary €25 for unlimited internet access (I can’t do without my WhatsApp chats and daily puzzle fixes, you know) and we interspersed reading the iPad, eating, following the ship’s progress across the Bay of Biscay, going out on deck to be blown around, and observing passing shipping and finding out what it was on marinetraffic.com.

We arrived in Santander a little before 8am, and it was still dark. We’d had a mini-breakfast on the boat at around 7, so after a wander around the port area, where we were treated to a perfect, cloudless dawn, we found the station where our train to Madrid was due to depart shortly before 2pm.

We found the station – or one of them. Santander effectively has two stations right next to each other, as Spain uses more than one gauge of railway line. We had found the narrower gauge station which is used for local services, but the high speed, long distance trains are on a wider gauge and eventually we were pointed to the right place. Neither of us speaks Spanish so the Google Translate app was earning its keep.

Our train to Madrid was an Alvia, a second-tier high-speed train that is capable of 250kph. When we set off, though, we seemed to be travelling remarkably slowly and I found out later that the first 100 kilometres or so are on a single-track railway which makes its anfractuous southward progress between high peaks and steep valleys. It’s very picturesque, but sometimes the train simply has to stop at a passing place and wait for something that is coming the other way. Thus it is that the 350ish kilometres to Madrid takes something over 4 hours, even though the train does actually reach pretty close to its maximum speed in the second half of the trip, when it passes through Europe’s longest tunnel, bar two or three in Switzerland.

We arrived in Madrid more than 50 hours after leaving home and didn’t really have the energy to do anything other than find our hotel, which, by careful planning, was only a short walk from the Chamartin station. We had a brief rest, and then enjoyed our evening meal in the hotel’s restaurant.

18/12/2024

Bored man with a camera

Filed under: Cycling,Essex — admin @ 5:25 PM

An occasional series.

06/12/2024

Ben and Ellen’s Wedding, 16/12/2006

Filed under: Walker family — admin @ 9:24 PM

Museum of Kent Life, Maidstone

My paternal grandparents

Filed under: Wales,Walker family — admin @ 4:43 PM

Inkerman and Sarah Walker

Inkerman Walker: born 1885, Bedwellty

Sarah Walker (née James): born Manorbier, 31/1/1882; died Swansea, 1/6/1963

Married: 5/9/1911

On their wedding day, 5/9/1911. One of their wedding presents was a Welsh slate clock engraved with the date. This was stolen in a burglary from our house in Southend in August 1993.

A postcard photo of Inkerman, which he sent to Sarah:
“Dear Friend, Here I am in all my attire. Just been preaching at Bargoed. I have found time at last to visit… I don’t feel half well so I sent myself on… Hoping you are quite well, Ink.” (Postcards were what people used in 1907 instead of Instagram)

Back row: Kathleen, Phyllis, Nan, Gladys (as she then was – Glenys in later life); Inkerman & Sarah; Beckie & Ken

Return to https://www.tickfield.co.uk/thewalkers/

18/04/2020

After lockdown

Filed under: politics — admin @ 10:27 PM

When the coronavirus started rearing its ugly, warty head, we as a family decided it would be a good idea to go into lockdown long before the government had advised on this. We have good reason to: my son had a kidney transplant in 2006 and is therefore classified as very high risk. Furthermore, I’ve been on the immunosuppressant methotrexate for the past 12 years for rheumatoid arthritis.

As luck would have it, my arthritis has been giving me very little trouble for quite some years so I weighed up the pros and cons and decided that, on balance, I would rather have a fully-functioning immune system should I contract this particularly nasty virus, and risk a certain amount of pain. At the time of writing, some 6 weeks have passed since I last took methotrexate and in that time I have suffered some mild pain in my hands on something like three of those days.

In the intervening period, we have been pretty close to tragedy. A good friend and her husband both contracted the disease and whereas she seems to have had relatively light symptoms, her husband died a few days ago. He was in his 50s, had never smoked, didn’t drink and had no previously identified problems that indicated a heightened risk. Such tragedies concentrate the mind rather.

My son received his government-inspired letter telling him he is at high risk and that he shouldn’t leave the house for 12 weeks. It was a week or two later that I received mine, but I contacted the rheumatology department at Southend Hospital and discussed my case with a medical specialist there and their assessment was that because I’m on only the one immunosuppressant, I’m not at particularly high risk, and since I haven’t been taking my tablets anyway, I’m still not at high risk.

We have been taking steps to try to ensure that the virus doesn’t enter the house, or, if it does, we kill it as soon as possible by washing our shopping with a detergent solution. No-one has visited us for well over a month. Since 13th March I have been doing my best to avoid shops. I have completely avoided the supermarket, which I identify as being one of the most likely places to pick up an infection. We have had friends and family going into shops for us, and we are very grateful to them, we’ve had a supermarket delivery, and I have managed a click and collect for Monday. We have also discovered a superb greengrocer in the form of Kirby & Lewis. This firm is normally a wholesale greengrocer, supplying schools and restaurants, but of course they are now selling direct to the public. We have had one large delivery from them, and today I visited and one of their staff put a big box of fruit and veg into my car for me. I had ordered by email and have set up a direct payment from my bank account to theirs. This is a convenient and pretty much risk-free way of buying provisions.

We are now looking towards the future and what happens when lockdown ends. The virus won’t magically disappear and vulnerable people will continue to die. The point of lockdown is to try to avoid overwhelming our hospitals and it looks very much, due to very irresponsible advice from Boris Johnson and other ministers in the early days, that it has been a complete failure as this country is heading towards the highest number of deaths in the whole of Europe, and in a year’s time probably only the USA and Brazil will be ahead of us. It’s no coincidence, of course, that these three countries are saddled with the most callous, uncaring leaders that any of them has had in more than 100 years. My son won’t suddenly lose his high-risk status and the more I’ve read about the nature of the victims of this virus, it seems that ICUs are predominantly occupied by overweight blokes over 60, which describes me to a T. Women seem, generally speaking, to be less badly affected. I’ve also seen some suggestions from China that people with blood group O seem to be less at risk than others. I’m A rhesus positive. Getting this disease, then, seems to be a very bad idea, even when the ICUs are not overwhelmed, medical professionals have enough PPE to protect themselves to an acceptable level and the disease is no longer occupying the front pages.

All of this means, of course, that we will still have to take measures to protect ourselves. I can’t see supermarkets, who are, after all, profit-driven, maintaining their social distancing policies that they have introduced in the past month or so, any longer than they have to. That could mean that after the restrictions are lifted, going shopping could be even more risky than it is at the moment. I’ll continue to scour the supermarkets’ websites looking for delivery slots.

What about socialising? We are still going to have to keep ourselves to ourselves, with all the implications that that entails. My wife likes to go out and socialise with her craft groups. We have good friends who fairly regularly visit us, and we visit them. We have other family members to visit – brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, grandchildren. Will we be able to hug people again without risk? At this stage, no-one has any idea whether catching this horrible disease will provide any long-term immunity. Will there be a vaccine? Will it mutate into something else? And of course, if it does mutate, the original strain will still be doing the rounds, creating mayhem and randomly picking off victims. Shops, pubs and restaurants are all likely to be sources of infection, so you simply cannot get away from the fact that since the transfer of this virus from wild animals to humans, normal socialising will become a game of Russian roulette for vulnerable people. And as has been starkly demonstrated by the case of our friend’s husband, not everyone who is vulnerable can be identified in advance.

We are going to have to get used to a “new normal” – one in which contracting a potentially deadly disease is a very real risk. In that sense, this actually removes some of the cocooning to which late 20th and early 21st century Europeans have become accustomed. That is a most uncomfortable thought. Hopefully as the next few months unfold we will be in a better position to judge.

24/07/2018

St. Andrews here I come!

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 10:23 PM

Posted on 24 July 2018

This is the first time for quite a few years that I have used the Caledonian Sleeper. After a very pleasant evening in the company of my good friend Jane at the splendid Look Mum No Hands cycling café in Old Street, I arrived at Euston in plenty of time to be able to use the showers in the first class lounge only to be told by the platform staff that the first class lounge was closed. However, there is a perfectly adequate was basin hidden away in my cabin so I employed the complimentary toiletries to good effect for an “underarm-underleg wash”, as my dear sister in law so delicately describes abbreviated ablutions.

Recalling how the movement of the train is not conducive to relaxing slumber, I retired early in the hope that I would nod off before our departure at 11.50, but that was a vain hope too. There was just too much hubbub and activity from other passengers and the slamming of the train doors just prior to departure would have woken me up in any case. Then the guest (we are “guests” on the sleeper: not “customers”, and heaven forfend that anyone should refer to us as “passengers”) in the adjacent cabin produced a sneeze of the kind of pitch and intensity of which the Flying Scotsman would have been proud. Then the train started moving. I think it would be easier to sleep in a chair facing the direction of travel rather than a bed across the carriage, but I have paid for this bloody bed so I shall do my best to sleep in it. Suffice it to say that this is the first night since being issued with my CPAP machine that I won’t be able to use it. There are no 3-pin sockets in the sleeper cabins. I don’t think it will matter very much: in order to suffer from sleep apnoea, firstly you have to be suffering from sleep.

Oh, and what, you may well ask, am I doing in St. Andrews? I shall be spending the next six days participating in a summer school dedicated to the study of the choral music of the great Johann Sebastian Bach. That, and catching up on my sleep.

17/07/2018

Monk and Trump

Filed under: Essex,politics — admin @ 10:16 PM

Posted on 17 July 2018

There are numerous pointers that show the dire times in which we live, and how the march to fascism is progressing. One of these pointers is media compliance: when the mainstream media uncritically, slavishly even, follows the line of the fascists and makes their job easier.

The BBC comes in for a great deal of criticism for giving the right-wing an easy ride, whether it is the frequency of Nigel Farage appearing on Question Time, or Laura Kuenssberg orchestrating shadow-cabinet members’ resignations on air. There have been a few examples of leading interviewers and presenters doing their jobs objectively and fairly: Eddie Mair’s demolition of Boris Johnson a few years ago was a splendid example, and more recently, Andrew Neill’s attack on a Tory vice-chairman for claiming that Corbyn had been instrumental in passing secrets to this country’s enemies.

However, these are the exceptions and more often than not the extreme right are given a very easy passage. I’m going to dwell on one particular example from BBC Essex which happened on Friday 13th July, and that was Dave Monk’s totally one-sided handling of the anti-Trump demonstrations.

Monk’s approach was with the question “So does protesting work?” which can be answered quite simply by pointing out that any change for the better in people’s living conditions was achieved through protest. Votes for women, abolition of slavery, people’s improved working conditions have all come about because of protest. It’s what our democracy is based on. Yet he took a call from an “Alex” in Burnham who spouted hard-right rhetoric which Monk, an educated man (King Edward VI Grammar School Chelmsford, Degree in Law) failed to challenge in any way. It was such a cosy chat that I suspected that this “Alex” was actually a plant he was given such a free ride for his odious views. His use of the far-right expression “snowflake” to describe anyone with reasonable, compassionate views, was repeated by Monk without question. The view was that Trump is president of the USA, and “Leader of the Free World”, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Monk that the Leader of the Free World does not pass legislation which allows his henchmen to rip babies from their mothers’ arms and lock them in cages, like a scene from the film “Schindler’s List”.

Then the programme cut to BBC Essex reporter Charlotte Rose in Southend who began by setting the scene, describing the small demonstration that was going on, and then added “It’s been quite an eventful 24 hours already, Dave. Clearly we saw in the Sun newspaper this morning the president saying the Brexit deal that Theresa May wants to negotiate was hopeless and we wouldn’t be able to do a trade deal with the US if we went ahead; he then rowed back on that this afternoon, saying the Sun story was “fake news”, he would love to do a deal with the UK so there’s been a bit of a reversal there already”. Sherry Fuller, one of the organisers of the protest, was introduced by Rose but was then rounded on by Monk, who clearly didn’t want any of this “snowflake” talk from his junior reporter, in one of the most unpleasant pieces of patronising on-air bullying I think I have ever heard. Sherry did especially well to withstand his line of questioning, and scored some excellent points. Sherry quite rightly pointed out that Trump was encouraging racists and homophobes and that his policies were very damaging. “Sounds great, Sherry, sounds great!” was Monk’s response, “but isn’t the reality in 2018 we’ve got to do a deal with the Americans in a post-Brexit world? We cannot afford to antagonise this man, we need him too much. He’s the President of the United States of America, we don’t have a lot of choice really.” It is curious, given those statements by Monk, that he didn’t challenge “Alex”. If it wasn’t for the stupidity of Brexit we wouldn’t be in the position that we had to rely upon a president who lies outrageously from day to day and who cannot be trusted on any issue.

When Sherry, quite reasonably, pointed out that Trump is closely following the path taken by Hitler in 1930s Germany, he was totally dismissive. “Don’t tell me you are equating Trump with Adolf Hitler, purleez tell me that!” follow by “No, no, no, no, no, that is going just too far. You may not agree with his views but you cannot say things like this. You are going completely over the top.” Sherry isn’t the first to make this comparison – serious historians say exactly the same thing, and Monk must know this.

When Sherry pointed out that Trump had rubbished May as a PM and that he had no respect for her, Monk said “He said that was fake news, that didn’t happen.”

This facility for a very experienced broadcaster like Monk to adopt the rhetoric of a serial liar, sexual molester, mocker of the disabled, one who allies himself with the KKK and Britain First, whose antics embolden the extreme right-wing thugs who are marching the streets in increasing numbers speaks volumes about where the BBC is politically. It is our licence fee that pays for the likes of Monk to appease fascists like Trump and his broadcast on Friday afternoon showed absolutely no balance. He should be utterly ashamed of himself and should be taken off the air.

Of course, the fact that Monk’s interview with Sherry Fuller took place on Friday afternoon means that Monk would not have been aware that Trump was about to show appalling disrespect to the queen; that a Trade Union leader was about to get beaten up in a pub by fascist supporters of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or that Trump was about to conduct a press conference with Putin that even Trump’s republican supporters were describing as “treasonous”. Of course, he wouldn’t have known these things, but none of them surprise anyone who has spent a few minutes watching Trump’s modus operandi and those of his supporters. They are all very strong signs that we are following a very similar path to that which Europe followed in the 1930s and are eminently predictable.

However, Dave Monk of BBC Essex clearly seems to think that such things are OK with his laid-back appeasement of a fascist president.

01/07/2018

Pembrokeshire – Take Two-and-a-bit

Filed under: beach,Wales — admin @ 9:11 PM

Posted on 30 June 2018

The sun continues to shine and we keep doing holiday stuff. We brought the electric tandem with us but it looks as though it is going to stay in the car. I have swum twice at Caerfai, twice at Newgale and once at Abereiddy, but we also took a couple of boat trips, firstly around Ramsey Island, where, amongst other things, we saw Manx shearwaters flying in, ready to visit their burrows on Skomer Island.

It’s worth spending a bit of time mentioning Manx shearwaters. Apparently 360000 breeding pairs, something like 90% of the world’s population, return to Skomer every spring where each pair raises a solitary chick. The adults spend all day, once the chick is hatched, flying out over the Atlantic to gather food and each bird covers about 200 miles per day. They return under the cover of darkness in order to avoid the predators, feed the chick, and before first light, off they go again.The RSPB ring a lot of the young, and it seems that the oldest Manx shearwater recorded was 58 years old. The warden reckoned that bird flew over 5,000,000 miles in its lifetime.

Once the chicks are sufficiently developed, the adults just abandon them, leave them in their burrows and fly to the South Atlantic. The chicks flap their wings a bit for a few days and once they feel up to it their first flight is a non-stop trip, also to the south Atlantic. An amazing species.

Apart from boats, nature and swimming (Jan hasn’t swum. She prefers to remain fully dressed whilst either painting a picture or doing things with wool) we have done a few more holidayish things. We visited a woollen mill on the river Solfach, spent an hour or two in St. David’s Cathedral and eaten some very fine food.

Today I had three swims, two at Nolton Haven and one at Druidston. Given what a marvellous beach it is, I rather regret never having been to the Druidston beach before. The cliffs are superb, with a variety of rock types, the sand is fine and golden, there are plenty of rock pools and there is no nearby car park, so there are few people who use it. We were told by a young couple who had been there all day that there was some drama during the morning as there had been a fairly significant rock fall and another couple were that close that they were fortunate not to be injured. So it seems like quite a good idea not to sit immediately under the cliffs.

This impressive phenomenon is the tidal surge between Ramsey Island and the mainland at a reef of rocks known as The Bitches, possibly so named because they have presented such a danger to shipping over the years. They act as a barrage, creating a very impressive tidal weir, which of course changes direction at every slack water. The water drops about a metre at peak tidal flow.

The “Blue Lagoon”, Porthgain
Kittiwakes

28/06/2018

Pembrokeshire – Take Two

Filed under: beach,Wales — admin @ 9:05 PM

Posted on 28 June 2018

My calf muscle continued to give me twinges for a few days so returning to continue my walk was out of the question – for the time being at least. However, I kept an eye on the weather forecast and when it looked as though there was a week of fine weather coming up, Jan and I used Pensioners’ Privilege and decided to try to find a B & B from Monday to Sunday. The Duke of Edinburgh in Newgale had one to offer, so I booked it, albeit at a higher price than I expected.

The journey wasn’t a great advert for the Nissan Leaf or the charging infrastructure. Repeated rapid charges raise the battery’s temperature and when the air temperature is getting close to 30°C the battery gets close to its operating limits. Add to that the fact that one of the charging points was out of action and it was a trying day. However, we arrived eventually and we plugged the car into a caravan hookup, the first time we have tried this. It worked beautifully and the following morning we had a fully charged, cool battery once again.

What I hadn’t spotted until I had committed the money to this venture was that we weren’t at a B &B, but just a B, there being no breakfast included in the price. For that privilege we had to walk along the road to the Sands café and buy our own and a week’s worth of bought breakfasts adds about another £100 to the total, which I felt was not good value for money. However, we were just across the road from a beautiful sandy Atlantic storm beach slap bang in some of the finest coastline that the UK has to offer, so there was plenty of compensation.

So far we have visited Caerfai, Newgale and Abereiddy beaches and I have swum at each. I don’t recall the water ever being so cold in Pembrokeshire and today’s swim at Abereiddy was quite painful to the feet as they became numb. However, the water was beautifully clear and at one point I could see an impressively large spider crab, whose carapace must have been as wide as my hand’s span. I was wallowing about chest deep at the time. Shortly afterwards I had to get out of the water because it was just too cold, and then, when I walked on the dark brown sand, it was too hot for comfort. Presumably a few more of these hot days will warm the water up a bit.

19/06/2018

Dale Circular

Filed under: Wales,Walking — admin @ 11:20 PM

The weather really closed in this morning with an amalgam of rain so fine it was fog. I had already decided to have a day off and visit Haverfordwest so I hung around in the Taberna awaiting the 10.48 bus. It was a bit late, but delivered me to Haverfordwest at about 11.30.

A quarter of my genes come from Pembrokeshire. My paternal grandmother was born in Manorbier in 1882. Her father, John James was, so my father told me, a freeman of Haverfordwest and his father, William, owned a shoe makers in Dark Street. I wanted to visit the records office to see if I could find any documentation relating to either of these gentlemen.

My first port of call was an estate agent named Lucas. According to the internet, so it must be true, the proprietors were leading lights in the Haverfordwest Gild of Freemen. But they weren’t there and the woman in charge gave me the very strong impression that the records they held were in a chaotic state and she wouldn’t know where to start looking. Then there was the Pembrokeshire Records Office which was some way out of the town centre. I phoned them and was told that they weren’t open to the public on a Tuesday but the woman who answered the phone took my email address and agreed to pass on anything she had. These two transactions didn’t take much time so, since the weather had improved a fair bit, I decided to return to Herbrandston, collect my boots, sticks and pack and get the bus to Dale. From there I would walk around the peninsula via St. Ann’s Head and then back to Herbrandston, taking advantage of the receding tide to shorten the walk by at least 6 miles, but still a healthy total of at least 11 miles.

I had a very good value lunch of plaice and chips at the Dale café and set off at about 2.30. The fog was still so thick that it was quite difficult from the clifftops to see the breakers whose ever-present roar was evidence enough that I was still on the coastal path. Despite the very poor visibility, there were quite a few people on the path. There were a few ravines to traverse so there was a fair bit of effort, but also quite a bit of easy flat walking. I saw a number of choughs and noticed from their silhouettes how slender are their beaks, more like a wading bird’s that the other corvids.

A short while after leaving St. Ann’s Head I noticed some discomfort in my right calf. I’m a bit paranoid about calf pain, having cut short a cycle tour and a lot of 2014 when I tore my left gastrocnemius. That was a sudden occurrence, but meant that I was laid up for 3 months whilst it healed. As I progressed along the east side of the headland so my calf became tighter and tighter, and a party I had passed earlier on when they dallied on a misty beach had no difficult overtaking me – prior to that I was just about keeping pace with them. Ascents and descents became tortuous and even on the flat I was suffering with each pace. I felt pretty sure my walk was over and limped back into Dale for a visit to the Griffin for some anaesthetic before the bus arrived at 6.25. The low tide sections, consisting of at least another 4 miles, would have to wait.

The bus stopped right outside the B & B so I ordered some anaesthetic in the form of a pint of Cwrw Teifi and told Peter the Landlord that I would be leaving the following day. Brenda the Landlady prepared me an excellent meal of rump steak etc. and Peter and I nattered away for the rest of the evening about life, the universe and choral singing.

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